How to Spark your Imagination and Get Excited about Coding

CSD. Welcome to Syntax on this Monday. Hasty treat. We're gonna be talking about how to spark your imagination. Get excited about coding.

You can picture yourself your little fire starter inside of West Boss's smoker, and you need to get that fire started. How are we gonna get there? My name is Scott Slitsky. I'm a developer for Denver, Colorado. And with me as always is Wes Balls.

Hey, everybody.

Excited to talk about how to spark your imagination and get excited about coding. I'm also excited. It. I listened to your episode on how to spark your imagination and get excited about coding, and I thought it was really interesting how you both got excited about cut like, do you ever get those emails, Wes, that are just, like, they it just, like, copied and pasted the title of your thing? I thought it was really fascinating how you talked about how to spark your imagination and it's like Like, okay. Here you go. I always love those because,

you can tell they're automated because the title of the podcast says Syntax tasty treats for web developers.

So anybody that says Oh, yeah. I'm interested in syntax tasty treats for web developers podcast, and I love it. Like, yeah. Right.

Yeah. Right.

We get, we get lots of lots of that spam, which is like like no. I know, like, we have lots of legitimate people email us as well, so no shade to you if we're not talking about you, but we get lots of it. Random people.

Yeah. It was actually really funny. Somebody had emailed Wes, and then Wes responded after we told this guy to buzz off. Wes basically Responded saying, hey. Wait a second. Before you buzz off, can you tell me how you found like, what list are we on? And the guy actually responded with, like, an in-depth, Here, I found you on this website, and, like, he actually gave us all the all the information.

That was hilarious. I I could not believe he responded because it's not like you were nice Nice about it. You were just like, hey. Can you just, like, not do this? Oh, by the way, tell me about how you can you explain to me?

So that was really funny. Usually, I'm just like, No. Thanks. Please take us off your list. And if they come back and say,

okay. I'll email you in 2 months, I would say, like, come on. We're not we're not interested. Anyways, let's talk about how to get excited. But first, let's talk about 2 of our amazing l named sponsors today. It. We have one that's Linode, and the other is LogRocket. LogRocket is the perfect place to see all of your errors and exceptions happen in a scriptable video replay. But not only that, you also get to see, it. All sorts of stuff because LogRocket has made visibility their brand.

And I I mean, just I I don't know if they actually have done that. I just kinda made that up, but It really makes sense because LogRocket gives you insight into how people are using your site and not just how they're using it when things go bad. They're also using it. That visibility, those tools that they've built to allow you to see how your website is functioning for the people who are using it well as well. There's all sorts of different performance monitoring tools, but also just user monitoring tools in a way that allows you to see who's using your site, how they're using your site, And what are their good and bad experiences? So that way you can adjust those experiences to their expectations and make sure that whatever your shipping is, it. Blasting off into the galaxy just to keep with the rocket theme. So you wanna check it out at log rocket.com it. Forward slash syntax on today, and you'll get 14 days for free. You just drop a little script on your site. And the next thing you know, you have it. All sorts of modern analytics that involve, visual visualizing into your site with a video replay. So thanks so much for LogRocket for sponsoring. We're also sponsored by Linode. They are cloud computing that developers

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Thank you, linode, for sponsoring. Sick. Yes. Alright. Let's get on into it. This is something that I feel passionately about, which is, how do you get excited about it? This is sort of I I wrote the tagline of this episode as this is an appreciation of coding projects that supposedly serve no purpose, it. Because certainly, I love doing stuff that serves no purpose. And, the reason why I do that is because I learn a lot when I'm doing stuff that has no stakes or is exploratory, and they might go nowhere. You might end up At a dead end, but you also might you you learn a lot along the way.

What's that what's that meme? Maybe it's not The end project that we ship, but it's the code we learned along the way. Beautiful.

You can have fun. Yeah. I I find it. I know a lot of developers, you do this day in, day out, and you're changing CSS rules or whatever. You start to this coding thing is, Maybe I don't like this. Maybe I should have been in the farmer.

Again. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That kind of stuff is frustrating. So, like, Doing something fun. If you remember back to when you first learned learned to code, sort of reignite ignite your love for coding is Super key, and I think that that can be done building something that serves no purpose. Or this is the third one. Maybe it does serve a purchase purpose, and it's scratching their own itch, which is building something

that you need done. I know, Scott, you've had a project. You wanna talk about that? Yeah. In fact, I I I have a lot of these types of products. I do these kind of things all the time. Some of them are higher stakes and others. Some of them are absolutely minimal no steaks whatsoever. So, some of them Our our steaks that are, you know, perfect. They've been cooked to a perfect pink in the middle, medium rare. Gotta love it. So, I have a project that is, one that I I use all the time in case I ever want to explore a specific stack, and I call it b boy tools, which is like, I'm a dancer. I've been dancing for, like, 20 years or so, long time now at this point, and I have a bad memory. So it. It's really hard for me to when I get into competitions to remember the moves I have or even at practice to remember all of the different moves I have because most of my dance is, Look, spontaneous. It's freestyle, but you have moves and you have to come up with them on the spot. And when I'm at practice, I gotta make sure I'm kinda drilling through my stuff so that way I it. Can keep it all tuned up. So I made an app that has some nice functionality because it includes things like authentication.

It includes, gesture based stuff. I usually do like a swipe to dismiss type of thing in there, and it includes, adding things to a database, cataloging, and categorizing things. But, this is the type of project right now. I've built maybe, like, 3 different times, 3 or 4 different times in different stacks because it's one of those ones that I actually end up using. In fact, I I The latest version of this thing I built with SvelteKit and super bass to learn super bass, and I got it up in, like, a couple hours and had authentication in no time. And know what? I'm sitting there at practice, and I'm firing open this app, and I have it installed as a PWA on my phone, And I'm getting to use this thing, and I I use it. I've now used it, like, 3 practices in a row, and it's made my practices way better. And sure enough, it was fun.

I got to learn something. I got to tear apart a new database challenge, and I got to grind on some skills that I I've, you know, been acquiring via SvelteKit and all that stuff. But it. It was just a a a straight up fun project with low stakes. A little bit higher stakes is stuff that I build for level up tutorial. So we we have a fair amount of open source projects that I work on for fun, and I end up using them and dogfooding them in our level of tutorials codebase. But, like, right now, I'm working on a project called kit or book it depending on how you wanna depending on how you wanna say it, whatever. It's kind of a storybook alternative because I was kinda sitting there, and I was really annoyed with storybook Just because it's like, I don't want a whole second process running. I don't wanna have to I don't wanna have a whole separate code base, so then I have to figure out how to import all my components And and all that stuff, I didn't work with my database, whatever. So I made of this bucket thing that's just like a route in your SvelteKit app That uses glob imports to pull in and do like a storybook style thing for your building in isolation.

And this I I say this this one has a little bit less Of, less this has less stakes than anything because I'm really especially right now, I'm the only person using it. But even in the future, I don't, you know, I don't intend for this thing to, like it's not a storybook killer. It's a very specialized tool, and other people will be able to use it. But at the same time, you know, it it's pretty low stakes because I can make whatever choices I want to make about this, and it affects literally no one but me. And it. Uh-huh. It it's really taught me a whole ton of stuff. I I've I've really gotten deep into some Veeet stuff. I've gotten deep into some Svelte stuff that I wouldn't have done. I'm getting deep into building complex estate management stuff with SvelteKit in a way that I haven't before.

So, honestly, there's a lot of really great things that you can learn from from these types of projects. I could go all day with this stuff because, honestly, I'm I'm the king of firing up a small little project. Whether I touch again after a couple months is a whole different story, but I I love this stuff. Absolutely. I agree.

So let's talk about, like, How do you spark your imagination with these types of things? And quite honestly, I think it's most important that you find something. You either find a piece of tech that you're interested in getting into Or you find an itch that you would like to scratch yourself. So one simple example is every now and then, I'll check the Clearance of Lowe's and Canadian Tire is the store we have here. And every now and then, they'll have, like, we've got, like, 4 or 5 stores within a 20 minute Drive from both of these. And, Erin, it's kind of annoying if you want to see, like, what's on sale. They'll have a couple of things, and they have clearance, like, a really good deal on something. So I just wrote a little script that would go and grab the the pages for every single store It's, like, 8 or so stores, and then it would, pull them all in and then sort them by biggest discount.

And then I also did a filter for different keywords that I'm interested in.

It's not really something that is That I use every single day, but it was a very fun project to dig into And to do all the fetching and the scraping of the data and and and whatnot. And I I just love those types of projects where it's like, I want to do this, but I don't have the time to spend 10 minutes every day clicking through all of these things. I just run and run a quick script, And then within 20 seconds every single day, I can get a quick overview of of what's going on. So that was a fun one for me. There's also you can just do things like Figure out how to use the the webcam. Audio manipulation are always fun ones for me. How do I manipulate the webcam or display audio waves? How do you go off and fetch and display data? I have here I we wrote these notes a long time ago. I wonder why I was thinking, but it says play a fart.

It. You were you were a play a fart? I that's that's hilarious.

Yeah. That's very funny. That's an app that you came up with. You're like, what's an app that I can write? App that I can be, like, very creative for me? An an app that that drops a fart sound?

Well, I'm just thinking here, like, at the very basic, if you're new to programming, how could you Use HTML 5 audio.

How can you scrub that back? So if you tapped it many times over and over and over again, it would play multiple times. You'd have to duplicate the audio elements so they're all playing over top of each other. How could you randomize the fart sound? How could you make it put it Host it on, like, Netlify or something like that. Right? And, like, it's such a stupid idea for an application. But if you think about it, it does include a 6 or 7 different things, and it's not a personal website or whatever that everybody else is doing. So just, again, This is an appreciation of coding projects that serve no purpose. And I think a fart app would be the epitome of that.

It does kind of serve a purpose, though.

So I have here, t t f s. It's all about the t t f s. That's time to first smile.

You just have to do something that will make you smile and say, this is fun, or I wonder if I could do that. Because when you start Having fun and throw out the frustration,

that's where the real learning happens in my opinion. Yeah. I I totally agree. I I think it's a lot of fun, and you can build some really neat things. I I think just any direction that you're interested in going. Right? Whether, Oh, I'm interested in IoT. I'm interested in animations. I'm interested in working with multimedia or the webcam. And there's The coolest thing about our industry is that, with JavaScript, you can do anything you want. So if you can think of it, you can probably hack together something. Now that's not to say, you know, you might be thinking, oh, I wanna learn it? Or virtual reality in JavaScript. Yeah. You can do that with 3 JS. Absolutely. But you might not be you might not be, like, making a professional game or something, but That shouldn't be the point of these things. Their point is you're you're just trying to take some time to explore a little bit and to build something, like, really, really neat. I mean, maybe maybe, Wes, here's what you're doing. Maybe you're building a virtual reality app. You walk into a virtual reality space, And then you see a button, and you push that button, and it makes a fart sound. That would be that would be really great. That's great.

Virtual reality card. Please make that.

So you just reminded me of, of why I made this card. So I it. I was working on an example for my TypeScript course, and we are doing augmented reality. So we pull in the webcam, And then the webcam is constantly looking for QR codes. And then when you hover over a QR code, it will put a label over top of that QR code.

So I said, here's an idea. Put QR codes on your electrical panel. And so you hover over top. It will tell you what each of them are. And I thought, like, I I I got a set of about it. I made it. I put the little stickers on it, and I got probably 50 people are said, Why don't you just write with a pen on the thing instead? Like like that was no like these people can no one could see past The fact that I was learning how to do augmented reality, learning how to do QR code detection, learning how to overlay a Data on top of a live video, and most of these people could not see past the fact That you could just write with a pencil on a piece of paper and put it beside that. And I said, like, that's why people don't move forward in their lives. That's why people The skills are stagnant because they are unable to like, my mind is constantly running with ideas and and stuff I wanna try new. And, Of course, a lot of it's gonna be dumb, but along with the way, you're learning a whole bunch of stuff, and there probably is some sort of real good use case or down the line. But if you're not able to put yourself in a position where this might serve no purpose, you're never going to

Continue those skills, I think. Yeah. Dumb dumb should not be a barrier in this category thing. If it's for us. That's fine. Yeah. It it doesn't matter if it's dumb or not. And I I totally get what you're saying about, like, man, some of us really do be wanting to be Wallace it. From Wallace and Gromit. Or was Gromit the who is the dog? Who is Wallace?

Do you remember Wallace and Gromit? Yeah. Who that's a good question.

Was it Gromit? Which one is the dog? I think that Gromit was the dog. Wallace seems like a person name, and Gromit seems like a dog name. Wallace is the guy. Gromit's the dog. Okay. Some of us really do be wanting to be Wallace from Wallace and Gromit. Like, I I do. I wanna I wanna bed that, like, it. Shoots me into my shoes that then makes toast for me and whatever. I mean, that's just kind of thing that, like, I like you said, I mean, Sparks the creativity.

It doesn't matter if it's dumb. It doesn't matter if there's better ways to do it. All that matters is that you had fun and you learned something. Time to first smile. Gotta love it. Beautiful. I just googled Wallace and Gromit, and one of the first images is of him wearing a VR headset.

Oh, that's great. Beautifully put. I wonder if he's pushing a virtual fart button somewhere.

We can only hope.

So that's that's my first thought. I think the last thing I want To say here is it can be very frustrating to try to build this stuff and also take on new tech. So I would say build it with literally whatever you know, unless you're looking part of learning this is to pick up a new piece of tech. So, personally, for me, I would probably grab Parcel and Feet, maybe React or Svelte or vanilla JavaScript, whatever whatever works because That's not what I'm trying to focus on. But if I was saying, hey. You know what? I would like to learn this new bundler as well as part of this, then maybe that's a good time for you to it. To dip into something new as well. Just don't put too many tripping hazards in your way

to to learning this stuff. Yeah. Totally. And in normal stuff too, don't put tripping hazards down. That's also a good life tip.

Good. Good. Anything else to add to your wrap it up? No. I don't. You know, just look at things that you think are fun or goofy or whatever. Look at things that you're interested in. Just do just have fun doing something. Yeah. That's it. Beautiful. Alright. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. We will catch you on Wednesday. Peace. It.

Peace.

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